Jack Chalker: Shadow of the Well of Souls

Brazil and the girl both stopped dead at the sound and turned. Brazil felt her sudden reaction to the speaker and understood it. She never reacted to the outward appearance of anybody; he wasn’t even sure she considered it relevant. But the inside, the important part of an individual, that she got immediately and with unerring accuracy. Not that he needed the loan of her talent for this case. The voice kind of oozed with a silky sliminess that would put anyone on guard. The fact that the figure who spoke matched the impression only reinforced the sense of menace.

“I beg your pardon,” Brazil responded politely. “Were you speaking to me?”

The creature they faced was less a form than a mass; it seemed almost made of liquid, an unsettling, pulsating thing that had no clearly defined shape, its “skin,” or outer membrane, a glistening obsidianlike shiny brown that reflected and distorted all the light that struck it. He couldn’t imagine how it spoke aloud at all.

“Pardon,” it said, revealing a nearly invisible slitlike mouth in the midst of the mass. “I had not even the slightest suspicion that there might be Earthlike humans on this planet, although God knows there is certainly every other nightmare creature.”

Brazil frowned. “You know Earth?”

“Of course. I was born there and once looked much as you.” The mass changed, writhed, and took on an increasingly humanoid shape, until, standing before them, it became what looked for all the world like a life-sized animated carving in obsidian or jade of an Earth-human man, middle-aged but ramrod straight. There was even a suggestion of a bushy mustache and the semblance of, yes, some sort of uniform. “Colonel Jorge Lunderman, late of the Air Force of the Republic of Brazil, rather abruptly retired but at your service.”

“So you’re one of the two officers that they told me about! I wondered who you were and how you wound up coming through. Oh—sorry. Captain Solomon is my name. David Solomon.”

“Captain? In the service of what nation?”

“None, really. Merchant marine. Countless ships under the usual flags of convenience.”

“You were in port, then, in Rio?”

“No, just on holiday there. I hadn’t been in Brazil in—a very long time.”

“I was commandant of the Northwestern Defense Sector—the area mostly of jungle and isolated settlements between Manaus and the western and northern national borders. A very large meteor struck, harmlessly, in the middle of the jungle, but a mostly American television news crew who went in to investigate and report on it vanished completely. There was quite a search using every resource at our command, but it was as if they had vanished into nothingness.”

Brazil nodded. “I understand. Somehow they must all have fallen through to here.”

“Well, some Peruvian revolutionaries had camps just along the border, and they were in alliance with some very powerful drug barons, one of whom had guaranteed the newspeople’s safety. We had fears that the crew had been disposed of for some reason, but we found only cooperation from the Peruvians. It seems one of Don Campos’s sons was among the group that vanished. We searched for weeks before giving up. Nothing. But this meteor, it was so strange that they were flying in scientists from all over to test and check and measure it. There seemed no harm there, though. They’d poked it and probed it and tried to drill into it, and nothing much had changed. The Americans sent a liaison, a NASA astronaut who was a geologist, to help coordinate. The two of us stupidly agreed to pose atop the meteor for the news media. It seemed harmless enough. The next thing we knew, we were here.”

Brazil listened carefully to the account, musing over the implications he couldn’t fully discuss with the colonel or anybody else. Why had a huge chunk of meteor with a fully operative Well Gate fallen so far inland? Hell, that was a thousand miles from Rio, where he was, and the Well computer hadn’t had any trouble almost hitting him on the head with one. Had Mavra been in Brazil as well? Maneuvered there by the subtle shifts of probability the Well was capable of when it concerned a Watcher? That still didn’t make sense. One didn’t go to the upper Amazon for a casual trip, but he couldn’t see her either in the drug trade or playing local revolutionary. Not unless she was leading the rebels, anyway. Or…

Just why had he decided to take his holiday in Brazil? Maybe it was he who’d been manipulated. The savage looks of the other party, the accounts of how primitive they and the girl had seemed… Mavra living with a tribe of Stone Age Indians deep in the jungle? That had to be the answer. How and why would have to remain a mystery, at least for now, but it explained a lot. But the colonel and the astronaut had come through weeks, maybe longer, before Mavra’s group.

Maybe the colonel’s initial search and, afterward, the colonel’s and the astronaut’s apparent on-camera disintegration would have made it hard as hell to reach the Gate. That had to be it. But then, who did come through with Mavra when she finally managed it? Others of her tribe? And if that was the case, where was that news crew?

“Captain? Are you all right?” the colonel asked.

“Oh, yes, sorry. I was just trying to fit events together. What brings you to Hakazit now, Colonel?”

“Why, I thought that would be obvious. You do. Both of you, in fact. I mean, it is still something of a shock to me to find myself here in this form and situation, but I accepted what had happened out of necessity. But I had not seen or heard of a race here that was like the one into which I was born, and suddenly there is news that at least two and perhaps more of what I still think of as ‘humans’ were around and apparently unchanged. I had to find out who you were and what you were doing and, of course, how the both of you manage to remain as you were. I assume she is as she looked before and is not some native human stock unknown to me. Your pardon, but the only surprise greater than seeing someone like you here is seeing her, standing there, stark naked, on a cold and windswept coast, apparently feeling no discomfort.”

“You’re right; both of us are from Earth. I suspect she came through the same gate you did. I came through in the hills behind Rio with two others I haven’t located as yet. She’s a mystery girl—arrived naked, painted up, bone jewelry and the like, and snuck right past everybody and entered the Well World without being noticed until too late. I have no idea why the computer they say controls things here decided to keep us both as we were, but I can hazard a guess as to why she’s more changed in other ways, including the ones that are obvious, than I am. There is a human hex here, but the people don’t quite look like any race or nationality we know and they’re primitive, mysterious, and very un-Earthlike in their ways. They took a different path somehow. Seems that long ago their ancestors plotted to take over an adjoining nontech hex, Ambreza, and forgot that lack of machines doesn’t equal lack of intelligence. The Ambrezians bred some kind of gas-producing plant that grew like weeds in the human hex and basically knocked their brains all to hell. Then they switched hexes, so now the humans are nontech and apparently have been ever since. It changed them. There was some sort of mutation. Had they remained high-tech, they’d have been fairly familiar, I think, but being nontech, they went to the ultimate nontech system. Because the computer still has them in their original hex, however, that’s where both the girl and I came in. I stayed and made myself useful to the Ambrezians—they look like giant beavers—while she fled to the human hex and fell in with them. It was they, I’m sure, that made her this way, not the computer.”